Keep the Home Fires Burning: A Novel of Radnorshire and the Great War - Softcover

KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING is an attempt to describe life as it was in Radnorshire from the beginning of the 20th. Century until after the Great War and the effect the local atmosphere nourished in Tom, the chief protagonist, on whom the book is based. The title of the work is owed to Ivor Novello who would spend family holidays with Tom's parents when he was a child and whose own mother had graciously played the organ for Tom's parents' wedding-ceremony. In the book, Ivor's song becomes all the more poignant as Tom, who has volunteered under-age for active service in the army, is marching through Boulogne en route for the trenches and the horrors yet to come. Miraculously (for not many young men survived as machine-gunners) he is brought safely through, abeit scarred and with a couple of enemy gunshot wounds to his leg but this is not the end of the story. As was so often the case when boys had been exposed to events too raw for prolonged discussion at home, once returned, Tom, unable to settle back beneath a semi-puritanical fa¿ade, finds he has become the actual outcast that unconsciously he must have always suspected himself to be: Ishmael. We leave him standing on the dock at Liverpool in early 1920 as a Remittance-Man to Canada.

Writing under names Ivonne Piper or Mary Parker:-Had short stories broadcast and published (BBC Wales: Morning Story, Stand Magazine, Planet and Swansea Review.)Winner of Welsh Arts Council prose-prize 1973. (Piece published in Planet 16.)Television play accepted by Harlech Television Co. in mid-70's.3 articles published in Irish Times - early 80's.(So far) 43 poems published in various magazines, a newspaper (London Welsh) and 3 anthologies ( People Within, Cheltenham Poets and In The Company Of Poets.)Poems published in Envoi 46, later placed in UCLA archives.Poems broadcast, late 90's - Radio 4.At present working on an esoteric literary work entitled Reality/Unreality also towards a collection of published and unpublished poems and short stories.